critical rationalism blog

Michael Williams Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction to Epistemology, Oxford Uni Press, 2001. At Amazon.

Ernest Sosa, of Brown University, writes

A masterly introduction to epistemology and an original contribution, this book succeeds on both levels. Those who know Michael Williams’s earlier work will not be surprised by the rich texture of his writing and by how well it conveys the history and geography of the land of epistemology, while staking out a position of his own within it. Without piling on references, never woodenly didactic, Williams’s manuscript still shows his mastery of the subject, in both its historical length and its contemporary breadth.

This is one of a genre of books where the central issue is the justification of beliefs with scarcely a  hint of the CR or Popperian approach. Williams is better than most because he actually mentions Popper several times, sometimes in passing and once with a few lines of dismissive criticism. The book received a number of five star reviews on the Amazon site and the one that is billed as the most helpful can be read to get a fair impression of the content. Continue reading →

Hot off the press, a new book on Learning, Teaching and Education Research.

A brief profile.

A previous book.

The University of New South Wales is the second biggest university in the state after the University of Sydney. This is the page in the handbook describing the Philosophies of Science unit in the Philosophy School.

There are three modules which are taught in rotation. The module on positivism is interesting from the CR point of view!

Module: “Positivism and After”
The nature and reliability of knowledge is a perennial question at the heart of the philosophy of science. Is there a scientific method? How does science differ from other enterprises and other kinds of knowledge? This course places such questions in the context of answers of the ‘Logical Postivists (Empiricists)’ in the early 20th Century – the Vienna Circle, following Ludwig Wittgenstein. The module will introduce key ideas of the Positivists concerning the nature of science and its methods, including particularly the question of how we might distinguish genuine science from various forms of pseudo-science or ‘metaphysics’. These philosophical attempts to understand the nature of science led to a major re-evaluation following the work of Thomas Kuhn on the Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the course will examine the directions that philosophy of science took in this post-positivist period, including the sociological approaches of ‘science studies’.

Deirdre McCloskey is a passionate advocate of rhetoric in economics as opposed to “big M” Methodology. She is a well-qualified and hugely published economist with a current project to produce several fat volumes of history and rhetoric to demonstrate the role of the bourgeoise virtues in generating the comfort and freedoms that we enjoy these days.

She likes to project the image of a “tough New York broad” and the result is a style that obscures her message. Some of the rhetoric actually undermine the core of her case which is (I think) that we need to lift our game in critical arguments (which she calls rhetoric) instead of being over-awed by scientism, defective statistical analysis and especially by the ruling fashions in the positivist philosophy and methodology of science.

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This is a very attractive and informative site, has it been around for long, I may have seen it and forgotten about it.

Out of the blue, or at least from the western edge of the known world, a Popper Prize at the University of WA.  Who is John Saunders?

Thanks to David Miller for the feed.

Troy Camplin points to the productivity of writers from Australia and New Zealand.

 On line. Not only an economist – autobiographical reflections of a historian of economic  thought.

Mark Blaug probably did more than any other single person to make the philosophy and methodology of economics a growth area during the 1980s. The specialisation and professionalisation of this area had the perverse effect of wasting several decades of effort by many talented and energetic scholars, with very little value fo working economists. This is a apparent from the stocktaking caried out by Wade Hands in Reflection Without Rules (2001), where the clear message is that the field has eventually arrived at something like the ideas of Karl Popper, which could have been taken up directly at least 40 years ago. Indeed Popper’s ideas were taken up directly by some people, including some economists such as Klappholz (with the aid of Joe Agassi). Radnizky, Boland (student of Agassi), Birner and Wong (student of Boland).

Possibly Blaug’s most serious mistake was to think that the

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